Select Correspondence of Ronald Syme, 1927–1939 Edited by Anthony R
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Select Correspondence of Ronald Syme, ����–���� Edited by Anthony R. Birley HCS History of Classical Scholarship Supplementary Volume 1 History of Classical Scholarship Editors Lorenzo CALVELLI (Venezia) Federico SANTANGELO (Newcastle) Editorial Board Luciano CANFORA Marc MAYER (Bari) (Barcelona) Jo-Marie CLAASSEN Laura MECELLA (Stellenbosch) (Milano) Massimiliano DI FAZIO Leandro POLVERINI (Pavia) (Roma) Patricia FORTINI BROWN Stefan REBENICH (Princeton) (Bern) Helena GIMENO PASCUAL Ronald RIDLEY (Alcalá de Henares) (Melbourne) Anthony GRAFTON Michael SQUIRE (Princeton) (London) Judith P. HALLETT William STENHOUSE (College Park, Maryland) (New York) Katherine HARLOE Christopher STRAY (Reading) (Swansea) Jill KRAYE Daniela SUMMA (London) (Berlin) Arnaldo MARCONE Ginette VAGENHEIM (Roma) (Rouen) Copy-editing & Design Thilo RISING (Newcastle) Select Correspondence of Ronald Syme, 1927–1939 Edited by Anthony R. Birley Published by History of Classical Scholarship Newcastle upon Tyne and Venice Posted online at hcsjournal.org in April 2020 The publication of this volume has been co-funded by the Department of Humanities of the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and the School of History, Classics and Archaeology of Newcastle University Submissions undergo a double-blind peer-review process This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence Any part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without permission provided that the source is fully credited ISBN 978-1-8380018-0-3 © 2020 Anthony R. Birley History of Classical Scholarship Edited by Lorenzo Calvelli and Federico Santangelo SUPPLEMENTARY VOLUMES 1. Select Correspondence of Ronald Syme, 1927–1939 Edited by Anthony R. Birley (2020) Informal queries and new proposals may be sent to [email protected] or [email protected]. Each submission will be independently assessed by two referees. ast year, when we launched HCS, we decided not to set any limits to the length of contributions to be published in the journal. Size L is of relative importance when it comes to digital publications. Yet some of the submissions we received were far off the scale for the brief of any journal, even an online one. We have thus come to the conclusion that it was worth establishing an Open Access book series to host larger-scale projects: the HCS Supplementary Volumes. Their scope includes — but is not necessarily limited to — the publication of large sets of documents (such as letters and other archival sources), the edition of unpublished manuscripts of scholarly significance, the reprints of classic works that have long been out of circulation and deserve renewed attention, and edited collections on aspects of the history of classical scholarship. We are delighted to inaugurate the new series with the edition of a selection of Ronald Syme’s correspondence, mostly dating between 1927 and 1939: it includes letters from, among others, Friedrich Münzer, Matthias Gelzer, Arthur Stein, Attilio Degrassi, Andreas Alföldi, and Eugénie Strong. The volume has been edited by Anthony R. Birley, a distinguished historian of the Roman world, and a pupil and friend of Syme, who was also the editor of five volumes of his Roman Papers and of a considerable part of his Nachlass. Most of the material published in this volume is drawn from the papers of Sir Ronald Syme currently on deposit at the Bodleian Library from Wolfson College, Oxford. Birley’s work was crucially supported by Syme’s literary executor, the late Sir Fergus Millar, whose recent death has been a huge loss to our discipline. We are very grateful to Thilo Rising, our copy-editor, for the profes- sional expertise and the support he has been bringing to this project since its inception. We are planning the publication of more HCS Supplement- ary Volumes over the coming months, and we trust to be able to bring them to completion in spite of the extremely trying circumstances we are all facing. quae iacerent in tenebris omnia nisi litterarum lumen accederet (Cic. Arch. 14) Lorenzo Calvelli Federico Santangelo Venice — Newcastle upon Tyne, April 2020 CONTENTS Introduction 1–22 Acknowledgements 23–25 Some Corrections 27–28 Special Abbreviations 29 Select Bibliography 31–32 The Letters 33–169 Postscripts 171–178 Appendix I: Syme Interviewed in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, October 1962 179–184 Endpiece 185–186 Appendix II: Syme’s Notes for Retrospective Talks 187–202 List of Individuals Named in Appendix II 203–208 List of Letters Included 209–211 INTRODUCTION oon after Ronald Syme’s death on 4th September 1989, his Literary Executor Fergus Millar suggested that I might edit and publish S some of the letters found among his papers. He referred in particular to those from fellow scholars, mainly from overseas, written during the 1930s. The initial plan was that they might be included in a volume together with some of his unpublished articles. I had already edited Syme’s Roman Papers III (1984) (and composed an Index of Ancient Personal Names for that volume and for Roman Papers I–II, which lacked one), as well as Roman Papers IV–V (1988) and VI–VII (not published until 1991 but approved by Syme before this death). These volumes are abbreviated RP. Fergus Millar also asked me to see what other unpublished material deserved publication. Priority was given to a substantial manuscript, the almost complete monograph composed at Istanbul while Syme was Professor there from 1942 to 1945: Anatolica. Studies in Strabo. This required a good deal of editorial work before it was published in 1995; it is abbreviated here as Anat. There remained a considerable quantity of other material, notably the incomplete study, The Provincial at Rome, started at Oxford in the mid-1930s but laid aside when Syme turned, instead, to writing what became The Roman Revo- lution, here abbreviated RR. After the addition of annotation, The Pro- vincial at Rome appeared in 1999, in a volume with five unpublished papers composed in the 1930s; it is abbreviated here as PatR. Thereafter the time did not seem ripe, either to the Oxford University Press or to this editor, for an eighth volume of RP, which might have included at least twenty unpublished articles, as well as selected letters. Hence the project was shelved, until a happy chance, in 2012, led to a new editor appearing, Federico Santangelo of Newcastle University. He produced, with Fergus Millar’s blessing, Approaching the Roman Revolution. Papers in Repub- lican History (2016), abbreviated here ARR, with copious addenda and bibliography.1 Meanwhile a Spanish research student, Gustavo García Vivas, of the University of La Laguna, had begun work on a dissertation devoted to Syme’s life and work, especially all his publications up to the appearance of RR. Through Fergus Millar he was advised to contact me and over the 1 In ARR, at the start of the section headed ‘The Background to this Volume’, Santangelo provides at p. 2 a helpful summary of the ‘sizeable body of academic papers … found in his rooms at Wolfson College, Oxford.’ Cf. also my own ‘Editor’s Intro- duction’ to PatR, xi–xx. 2 Select Correspondence of Ronald Syme, 1927–1939 next three years we conducted a regular correspondence by email. This culminated in the completion of the dissertation and its acceptance by the university after a ‘Tribunal’ at which I was asked to preside in July 2015. The result was published in Barcelona in 2017 as Ronald Syme. El camino hasta La Revolución Romana (1928–1939); it is abbreviated here by the author’s name, García.2 Both Federico Santangelo and Gustavo García urged me to resume the editing of the Selected Letters and Fergus Millar once again expressed his support, when Gustavo and I met him in Oxford in 2016. Initial transcription had been made in the early 1990s of some of the letters then still in the library of Wolfson College. Short visits to the Bodleian Library in 2013 with Federico Santangelo, in 2016 with Gustavo García, and finally in July 2019 gave me the opportunity to consult many of the letters again, now housed in an archive of the Special Collections.3 Fergus Millar had suggested joining me for coffee on 2nd July, and I greatly looked forward to discussing my final preparations for publication. But a few days before this he had to go to hospital and sent a message that he could not manage to meet me. Less than two weeks later, on 15th July, he passed away, leaving an immense gap in Ancient History; and for myself a matter of personal sadness for the loss of a colleague I had known for over fifty years, not least because he did not live to see this project completed. The contents of the Syme Archive include hundreds of letters, a great many simply to congratulate Syme on his honours, his knighthood in 1959 and the award of the Order of Merit in 1976. Syme also kept a good many private letters from relatives and friends, photographs, press- cuttings and reports from his time in the Belgrade Embassy and at Istanbul University. Besides this, the Archive contains a considerable quantity of notes for lecture-courses and guest-lectures, lists of various kinds, and slips with references to be included in planned articles. The selection here concentrates for the most part on academic correspond- ence from the years before the outbreak of the Second World War on 3rd 2 It should be noted that this scholar has now altered the order of his surnames and publishes his work as Gustavo Vivas García. 3 The Archive is called ‘Additional papers of Sir Ronald Syme 1830s–1990sʼ. The full range of shelfmarks is MSS. 11378/1–67. See the list at the end of this study registering the shelfmarks of the letters.